West District Long Course Championships (WE1)

Stuart McDougall

Meet Report

West District Long Course Championships 2024 – WE1

3-4 February 2024

This weekend was the first long course competition of the season with the West District Long Course Championships. This was held at East Kilbride as Tollcross is out of action currently. Long course means swimmers are racing in a pool 50m in length compared to the 25m pool that they train in.

We had 10 swimmers taking part across the weekend. Swimmers aged 14 years and under were racing on the Saturday with swimmers aged 15 years and over racing on the Sunday. For the majority of our swimmers, this was their first or second time racing long course.

This was 10 year old Arran Graham’s very first West District and long course meet. He was competing in the 11-12 year old age group as West District are age at 31^st December. He had 2 races and managed to win a fantastic gold and silver medal in the 50m and 100m backstroke respectively. Arran’s squad mate Liam Hendry just missed out on a medal in the 50m backstroke with a 4^th place finish and had strong swims in both his 50m butterfly and 100m backstroke.

We had strong showings from Rachel Cameron, Hannah McMillan and Adam Northcote on the 200m breaststroke. Only Hannah had raced this event long course before and made an improvement from her previous time. Hannah had a busy day with 5 races and her other 4 were her first experience in those events long course. Rachel made a good improvement on her previous 200 IM time from last year and Adam did very well on his very experience in the 50m pool.

Our girls racing only backstroke over the weekend did very well with all 3 finishing in the top 10 in at least 1 of their races. Mirren Stewart was 6^th on her 50m backstroke, Kimberley Cameron was 7^th in the same event and Madison Gourlay 10^th in the 200m backstroke. Mia Loudon raced the 50m backstroke but also for the first time the 400m freestyle. She was spot on her entry time with a very controlled race throughout. Cameron Hamill was our most experienced swimmer this weekend and managed 3 new best time from his 4 races.

Our next competition is round 2 of the West District Championships on 17-18 February. A round up of our top 10 places can be found below:

Gold

Arran Graham 11-12 years 50m backstroke

Silver

Arran Graham 11-12 years 100m backstroke

4^th

Liam Hendry 13 years 50m backstroke

5^th

Cameron Hamill 16 years 400m IM

6^th

Liam Hendry 13 years 50m butterfly

Mirren Stewart 14 years 50m backstroke